This spring, in conjunction with Greg Mortenson’s visit to Emma Willard, students have been collecting “Pennies for Peace,” a fundraising effort started by schoolchildren in the Midwest to help Mortenson build schools for girls in Afghanistan and other parts of Central Asia.  In the 1820s, many of Madame Willard’s pupils who hailed from Waterford belonged to a Presbyterian organization called “The Female Cent Society,” a fundraising organization that helped needy boys attend Princeton Theological Seminary.  Same principle, same pennies (albeit much more valuable then)–very different causes!

In 1858 an observer of the social scene in the Buchanan White House commented in her journal about the new fashion introduced in D.C. by Lady Gore Ouseley.  (Lady Ouseley, nee Marcia VanNess, was a graduate of the Troy Female Seminary, and her husband was a British diplomat, credited with establishing British influence in Argentina, when he served as the first British consul to that country [think Falklands].  Her husband’s father, Sir William Ouseley, was also a diplomat and served as his brother’s secretary when that gentleman, Sir Gore Ouseley, was the ambassador to Persia and negotiated the Treaty of Gulistan which gave Russia Azerbaijan, part of Georgia and the Republic of Daghestan–all of which probably contributed to some of the issues in the Middle East today, but that’s another story.) At any rate, Sir Gore and his lady, the Vermont-born, Troy-educated Marcia, were part of the “in crowd” in D.C. in 1858.  So, people took notice when Lady Ouseley “introduced the English novelty of the red petticoat,” which was “all the rage in London.”  To be specific, said petticoats were made of wool, “with black stripes woven in and are said to have a most coquettish and bewitching effect although that will depend upon the person who wears, and the manner of handling them.”  For another view of the impact of the red petticoat, we have a poem by Charles Mackay, a Scottish contemporary of the Ouseleys:  “Oh, the red, the flaunting petticoat!/That courts the eye of day;/That loves to flare, and be admired/And blinks from far away./It may delight the roving sight,/and charm the fancy free,/But if its wearer’s half as bold,/I’ll pass and let her be./With her red, her flaunting petticoat/She’s not the girl for me.”

A young woman from Troy named Sarah Tracy attended the Troy Female Seminary from 1833 to 1835 and again in 1837-38, after which, like so many other young women who studied with Emma Willard, she went south to teach.  By 1860, however, she had a new job.  She was an assistant to Ann Pamela Cunningham, a South Carolinian who was heading up an effort to preserve Mount Vernon.  The home of the first president had fallen into serious disrepair, and a group of women had formed an association to repair and restore the mansion.  Cunningham and Tracy moved in on February 22, 1860.  Shortly, however, Cunningham was called home because of family illness, and she left Tracy in charge.  Momentous changes were coming to the United States.  In November Lincoln was elected president, and by December, 1860, South Carolina led the southern secession.  In March, 1861, Lincoln was inaugurated, and in April, rebel forces fired on Ft. Sumter.  By July, open hostilities between the northern and southern armies commenced with the first Battle of Bull Run, which took place just a few miles from Mount Vernon.

Sarah Tracy, a northerner who had spent two decades in the South, decided to stay at Washington’s home.  For the duration of the war, with the help of a caretaker named Upton Herbert, she kept both northern and southern troops from invading, attacking or destroying the home of the first president.  She determined that the “public…need fear no molestation of this one national spot belonging alike to North and South.”  She was there to stay.  She negotiated with General Winfield Scott and the governor of Virginia to insure that soldiers from both sides would lay down their arms before entering the grounds.  Most soldiers complied, and some even paid an entrance fee.  When General George McClellan created problems for her, she managed to travel to Washington, D.C., for an audience with Lincoln, himself.  He acceded to her request for a pass that would allow her to travel at will through Union barricades.

Thanks to Sarah Tracy, when the war ended, Mount Vernon was intact, and the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association took up their restoration work in earnest.  In Troy, Tracy had studied U.S. history from the textboook written by Emma Hart Willard.  Mrs. Willard stressed the idea that the success of the United States came from compromise among competing interests.  Sarah Tracy lived that idea in her defense of Mount Vernon during the Civil War.  And, in a romance reminiscent of  “The African Queen,”  she married the caretaker.  She was forty, and it was her first marriage.  According to the census, in 1880 they were living in Lee, Virginia.  He was a farmer, and she was “keeping house.”

Many of the students at the Troy Female Seminary became socially or politically active later in life.  While Emma Willard did not openly advocate activism, she clearly sent a message that her students were privileged and needed to use their education for the betterment of others. 

Two interesting women who shared a cause almost crossed paths in Troy.  Mary L. Bonney, who attended from 1834 to 1836, and Cornelia Wright, who attended from 1836 to 1839, passionately advocated for Native Americans.  Bonney, the founder with another TFS alumna of the Chestnut St. Female Seminary (later Ogontz School for Young Ladies and alma mater of Amelia Earhart), also founded the Woman’s National Indian Association, which was credited with influencing major national policy in the late nineteenth century, including the Dawes Act.  (Interestingly, another T.F.S. graduate taught at Chestnut St. in the 1850s–that was Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage!)

Cornelia Wright was also an educator.  She taught in the South after leaving Troy and married the first Episcopal bishop of Minnesota and helped him run Shattuck Academy, an Episcopal school for boys in Faribault, Minnesota, and encouraged the development of St. Mary’s, the girls’ counterpart, where she was the major administrator.  Living in Minnesota in the post Civil War period, she came in contact with many Native Americans and became a champion of their rights.  A group of Dakotas in the immediate Faribault area were so grateful to her that they called her “St. Cornelia.”

Many Troy Female Seminary graduates from the first half of the nineteenth century married West Point graduates, and Emma Willard visited the Point several times, among other things to compare notes on mathematics instruction with professors there.  Two T.F.S. students in the 1830s had ties to other branches of the military.  Agnes Powell ‘32 married Ambrose Spencer, son of John Canfield Spencer, Secretary of War and Treasury under John Tyler.  Agnes’ brother-in-law, the nineteen-year-old Philip Spencer, was hanged for mutiny.  His tragic case led the government to establish a naval academy at Annapolis to train young sailors more appropriately.  Later in the decade, Martha Reed ‘38 married Alexander Mitchell of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  Their grandson, Billy Mitchell, a WWI ace, is regarded as the father of the United States Air Force Academy.  (The dining hall at the academy is named for him as is the airport in Milwaukee.)  Just another strain of U.S. history touched by the lives of women who studied under Emma Willard.